Tag: blogging

2025 in Cats

~ Veselin ~ 9 Comments

I counted all the cats published on this blog one by one. Placed them in a spreadsheet. Added aggregation. This is the result.

I published 382 posts before this one in 2025. 98 had cat photos or 25.6%. Many of the photos featured multiple cats. The total number of cats for the year was 151. In comparison, I also published 64 book photos and 66 screenshots.

The most catilicious posts of the year are:

Some cats from the gallery.

The Detective by Matthew Reilly

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

A private investigator reopens a cold case involving a serial killer who has been abducting victims for over 150 years.

I’m a fan of Matthew Reilly and his wildly unrealistic thrillers. Based on the description of this one, I was expecting at the very least aliens. It turned out to be far less extraordinary than that, but still very much in the right style and grandiosity. An easy, fast read. 5/5, although you should not expect depth of characters or anything like that. Despite the heavy topic, it’s mostly a bubble gum thriller.

The book below is The Hunger of the Gods, for scale and color.

What Level of AI Use Is Okay for a Blog Post?

~ Veselin ~ 12 Comments

I spend part of my day reading posts and I catch myself developing an allergy to AI slop. At the same time, AI is right into the editor, and attempts to change every word I write incorrectly. So not using it would be foolish. Here’s my gut feeling about what’s fine and what isn’t.

Not Fine

  • Copy/pasting any direct results of a prompt. It deserves a separate post why that’s not fine but for now, it’s a form of bad taste.
  • Any form of GenAI images. They were fun for a little bit. Now, they are just a way to state that the post is AI slop.
  • Let AI change the meaning of content when improving. AI tends to flip the meaning when doing subtle improvements.
  • Engine-oriented titles. If I’m the reader, I want text oriented for humans, not engines. The engines can burn some more CPU and figure it out.
  • Letting AI remove complex words, slang, puns, and emotion. Too much uniformity doesn’t improve readability, it sterilizes the text.
  • Emoji. Thanks to ChatGPT, emoji are like peanuts in a text.

Fine

  • Syntax, clarity, and feedback. AI can help improve the structure and readability the text.
  • Improve individual sentences. I tend to write long sentences and use unconfident words (examples from my post below). Funny that it uses the word unconfident but asks me to remove the word unconfident.
  • Research. Copy/pasting the body of a post to ChatGPT sometimes help find stuff I missed and fact checks. Particularly useful for book reviews.
  • SEO improvements, as long as it doesn’t change the meaning of the content.

Overall, when I catch excessive AI use, I feel an ick about the text. If it feels AI generated entirely, zero chance that I’ll read it.